When a silver halide color photographic material is imagewise exposed and developed with an aromatic amine color developing agent, dye images are formed by a reaction of dye image forming coupler(s) (hereinafter simply referred to as coupler(s)) and an oxidation product of the color developing agent formed as the result of development. For a multicolor photographic material, a combination of a yellow coupler, a cyan coupler, and a magenta coupler is usually used.
In general, the quality of photographic images obtained from silver halide color photographic materials is not permanent and degrades during preservation with the lapse of time. Particularly, with respect to color photographs, when they are exposed to light for a long period of time or preserved under conditions of high temperature and high humidity, color fading or discoloration of dye images and discoloration of the white background ordinarily occur and the color images degrade. This degradation of the color image is a fatal defect for recording materials.
In order to eliminate such a defect, various proposals have hitherto been made. Among these proposals, methods of using color fading preventing agents are extremely effective. As such color fading preventing agents, there are known, for example, hydroquinones, hindered phenols, tocopherols, chromans, coumarans, and the compounds formed by etherifying the phenolic hydroxy groups of these compounds as described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 3,935,016, 3,930,866, 3,700,455, 3,764,337, 3,432,300, 3,573,050 and 4,254,216, British Patents 2,066,975 and 1,326,889, Japanese Patent Publication No. 30462/76, etc.
These compounds may have the effect of preventing color fading and discoloration of dye images, but since the effect is yet insufficient for meeting the customers' requirement for high image quality and the use of these compounds changes the hue, forms fogs, causes poor dispersibility, and causes fine crystals after coating silver halide emulsions, overall excellent effects for color photography have not yet been obtained by the use of these compounds.
Further, it has recently been found that color stain occurs during preservation after development processing owing to the fact that components of the processing solutions remain in the processed photographic materials. Of the components of processing solutions, the use of a color developing agent is particularly of concern because it causes the occurrence of color stain. For the purpose of preventing the occurrence of color stain, the effectiveness of certain amine compounds have been proposed in U.S. Pat. Nos. 4,463,085 and 4,483,918, Japanese Patent Application (OPI) Nos. 218445/84 and 229557/84, etc. (the term "OPI" as used herein means a "published unexamined patent application").
However, these compounds are still insufficient in achieving an overall preservability of color photographs, although some degree of improvement in preventing the occurrence of color stain has been observed.
As described above, in the case of using color photographs as recording materials to be preserved for a long period of time, their preservability is not sufficient and thus, further improvement in preservability has been desired.